My school leadership journey started 23 years ago in a monochrome world.

Your school was either maintained by the local authority or the diocese - that was it. Some may have had foundation status but this, by today’s standards, was the fallen fruit.

Certainly, if I had been told that I would one day lead a multi-academy trust (MAT) of 23 schools, it would have sounded like fiction.

Yet it has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a part of the academy trust movement and I consider myself wonderfully fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time for this journey.

A learning process

I’ll admit, though, that when it began in 2011 with the advent of the Academies Act, the potential was not perhaps immediately obvious, with many seeing first the opportunity to be a “standalone” with control over their own destiny, rather than any grander vision.

In time, though, we realised we were operating in splendid isolation. This all changed in 2014 when our first partner school joined us to create a MAT.

Only then did we begin to envisage the full potential of the academy movement; groups of schools working together in a permanent partnership for the benefit of the children in our charge, work that has guided the last decade in our trust to help unleash this potential to the full.

New horizons

For teachers, too, this was a sea change, with a multitude of career opportunities opening up in a manner and scale not seen before within the schools sector - not just by moving around schools within a MAT, but entirely new roles, linked to the delivery of national professional qualifications, teacher training and system leadership.

With trusts also came a significant increase in demand roles for support staff in finance, HR, IT, estates and much more, helping professionalise these roles within trusts and bringing greater management skills to the sector, too.

What’s more, we also started to see the trust sector lead on national initiatives, such as the National Institute of Teaching, in a manner never previously possible, not least because the government recognised the knowledge, expertise and impact trusts offer at scale, both regionally and nationally.

Future evolutions

Nowhere was the power of schools operating in unison more apparent than in the pandemic, where the resilience of the academy sector came to the fore.

Since then, this has only become more important as challenges around attendance, behaviour, attainment and teacher recruitment and retention dominate the sector - and these seem topics unlikely to disappear from the top of the agenda any time soon.

In fact, as these topics continue to play out, I can only envision more maintained schools and standalone academies moving into trusts, while smaller trusts will like to merge into larger ones, in order to utilise the benefits of being in a trust when tackling such wide-ranging and structural issues.

As more large trusts form, there will perhaps be a second era of growth that is defined by those wishing to reach a size and scale required to command the attention of a crowded sector and those that wield the levers of power, with perhaps 50 schools as a benchmark.

Political goalposts

The political future for trusts is by no means certain either, though. While whoever takes power is unlikely to dispense with the trusts, there is no knowing what policies or requirements will come to the fore, which could mean visions of growth have to be curtailed or reconsidered as goalposts are moved.

Finally, navigating this uncertain future filled with challenges - both the knowns and the unknowns - will have to be done not by the long-standing CEOs who helped shape the academy sector, but by the MAT 2.0 generation of leaders who will have to take the reins.

In many trusts, these leaders are already in place, while in others, such as my own, the transition will likely take place in the not-too-distant future.

As such, as I reflect on my own trust history and look to the sector’s future, I am happy to admit I envy these new leaders for the journey that lies ahead and all that it will entail.

While my generation may have grown the trust landscape, it is these new leaders who have the chance to create a new era and help the system realise its full potential.

Rob McDonough is the CEO of the East Midlands Education Trust